Weekend 11: Mountain Biking in Bend Oregon

I spent weekends 9 and 10 in Cape May New Jersey with Dan and his family. The trip was a blast, but it was in NJ, not Seattle, so I'm not posting the pictures.

For Labor Day weekend, Jared and I headed out to Bend Oregon for 3 days of epic mountain biking. Bend is located in Central Oregon, and the climate is very similar to New Mexico. With bright blue skies with only a few clouds far off in the horizon, we rode our asses off around waterfalls, lakes, and large calderas. At night, we either hit the pubs in Bend (there are 8 there, more per capita than anywhere else in the US), or we kicked back at picnic grounds where we waited until dark to lay out a tent (for Jared) or a sleeping pad open to the stars (for Me).

Day 1: Pictures

I believe this is Mt. Bachelor. Central Oregon is very dry, and when it snows it is very powdery, similar Utah. Beautiful Skiing/Snowboarding from what I understand.

This is the waterfall we circled. Sweet.

Me next to the most ridiculously ripped human being on the planet.

Day 2:

I had been taking pictures of these trees when we pulled into this "camp ground" (i.e. Parking lot for a boat launch) the night before. Those pictures didn't turn out so well. This one however, I just love. It is that fresh morning light at sunrise with that beautiful blue sky that just gets me.

This little bastard kept getting into Jared's car, my backpack, my almonds, our everything on a quest to find free food. I asked him to stop, just for a second, to pose for this picture and he obliged.

The ride on Day 2 started off in a burned out section of forest. It was really just cool looking. Fire really screws up the land initially, but is beautful to see how the land recovers.

Maybe half way into the trip (we were doing a perimeter ride of the lake) I stopped to take this. It was one of the few phot0-stitches that worked that day. But it worked well.

Hanging out at that lake after the ride. The water was quite refreshing.

The third day of riding ended up being quite interesting. About a mile into the ride, Jared realized he had forgotten his helmet. He told me to continue on up the mountain and wait for him where the turnoff to the trail was. I did so, but I never actually saw the trail... so I rode to the top of the mountain. It was a hard climb on the fire road, but extremely well worth if for 360 panoramics I got at the top. Talk about breathtaking.

Anyway, after I screwed around up top for too long, I turned around and found the trail about a half mile down. I waited there for a few minutes and finally came to the conclusion that while I had been at the top, Jared had probably just headed on down the trail thinking that was the way I had gone. So I rode on.

I figured I would never catch him, so I took the invite to join a group of 3 other rides from the Bend area, all teachers and all on an adventure racing team. It was a blast riding with them, and by the end of the ride they had me convinced that it was my destiny to move to Bend. Man, the people you can meet on a trail are just incredible. And their ideas really can be brilliant.

We rode together for the rest of the day... pretty casual. On the last downhill, I believe all three of them ate-shit... two endoed (a not so fun front flip over the handlebars) and one had his wheel wash out. We met down at the parking lot, congratulated eachother on a great ride, got eachothers information, and said goodbye for the time being... until I move out there.

Day 3:

Looking out from the top. The views were just HUGE.

Looking down on the lava flow and the two lakes of the caldera. This ride consisted of following the ridgeline of the caldera from right to left in this picture. The pictures below are looking back towards this mountain. In essence they were taken about at the 1/3 and 2/3 points.

Looking back on the lake and the first peak we (the triumvirate and I) climbed. It was very strange how the trail went from pumice gravel to red volcanic rock gravel without any transition section. This was taken from a bald spot covered in the red gravel.

Again, looking back on the original peak we had climbed. This was on the fastest, straightest, most amazing descent I have ever done on the bike. It was blinding fast.

On the way home, the sky was just phenominal, perhaps my favorite sky of the summer. There was a fire somewhere in Oregon, and the smoke had swept across the sky to form a big black strip. The sun was just about to dip behind this strip, which worked well with the camera.

This is taken from the road. I had made Jared stop... he chatted on the phone and I snapped about 1800 pictures. I tried to get just the sky in a few, but they didn't stitch up for some reason. No worried.

Mt. Hood is FAR off to the right in this picture. I have no idea what the volcanoes to the left are.

The pictures above were taken as we were driving along into the sunset. They just look fake to me... as if I took a picture of a sky and overlaid a silhouette on top of it. Pretty cool, I think.